After Covid-19, big retailers now own 90% of the online pet food market. Can a new organization help small pet shops hang on?
As the cold darkness of winter set in and the calendar flipped to a second year of Covid life, Kaite Giordano, a fourth-grade teacher in New York City and the mother of seven-year-old James, made a major decision. To break free from the doldrums, their Brooklyn household needed to expand.
And so James got a new bestie: Chewie, a Cavapoo named after everyone’s favorite Wookie—not the online pet supply juggernaut. Although Giordano had never owned a dog before and wasn’t really a pet person, she thought a four-legged friend was just what the family needed. “The loneliness and isolation of…
A well-meaning Twitter thread goes off the rails
Oh, Burger King, you can’t “Have it your way,” when it comes to Twitter etiquette.
By now you’ve likely seen Burger King U.K.’s tweet (it’s since been removed) that said, “Women belong in the kitchen.” On any normal day, this tweet would’ve been considered a huge miss. On International Women’s Day, well, you can imagine the reaction.
But wait. Hold up. Burger King U.K. had a plan, one their marketing team must’ve thought was brilliant.
The tweet was a setup for two more tweets that would explain the scarcity of female chefs and that Burger King U.K. …
We’re entering the desert. Which would you rather be?
Even before the coronavirus shocked markets, the sheen was starting to fade from Silicon Valley’s obsession with finding, funding, and building the next unicorn — the valley’s nickname for startups valued at over a billion dollars. The collapse of companies with runaway valuations like WeWork and Brandless exposed flaws with the valley’s preferred strategies of “blitzscaling” and relying on VC-subsidized products.
Meanwhile, startups outside Silicon Valley have been proving a different model of success. In emerging markets are companies we can learn from because they have survived harsh business climates with less capital and ecosystem support. These startups are more…
Typically a play for billion-dollar companies with nine-figure marketing budgets, we decided to go for it
Yesterday, 99.9 million people tuned into the Super Bowl. Even if you don’t follow football, you probably caught the halftime show and some of the expensive, celebrity-filled (and often hilarious) commercials, which is why so many advertisers use the game to promote their products. At $5-6 million per 30-second unit, the game is typically reserved for billion-dollar companies with a hundred-million-dollar marketing budget.
Last night, Hint was one of the few upstart brands competing with the big brands for the title of best Super Bowl ad of 2020.
Watch the full Hint commercial here:
